“Pizza upskirt” is the term for a from-underneath-the-crust photo of a slice of pizza. Example. Does that make this a hamburger down blouse?
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The year in errors
Every year, Regret the Error1 publishes a roundup of the year’s media errors and corrections. I didn’t think anything could beat these corrections from the 2005 list:
Norma Adams-Wade’s June 15 column incorrectly called Mary Ann Thompson-Frenk a socialist. She is a socialite.
The Denver Daily News would like to offer a sincere apology for a typo in Wednesday’s Town Talk regarding New Jersey’s proposal to ban smoking in automobiles. It was not the author’s intention to call New Jersey ‘Jew Jersey.’
but the 2006 collection is a strong one. Here are some of my favorites:
A correction in this column Thursday about a June 14 Taste section recipe for French coconut pie incorrectly suggested that the recipe called for a pint of vodka.
In Wednesday’s Taste section, a Washington Post recipe on Page F7 included an incorrect cooking time for carbonada (braised beef with onions and red wine). The dish should be cooked for 2 1/2 hours, not 10 to 20 minutes.
Because of an editing error, a recipe last Wednesday for meatballs with an article about foods to serve during the Super Bowl misstated the amount of chipotle chilies in adobo to be used. It is one or two canned chilies, not one or two cans.
A story in the July 24 edition of the Sentinel & Enterprise incorrectly spelled Sheri Normandin’s name. Also, Bobby Kincaid is not a quadriplegic.
The regional court in Duesseldorf ordered the weekly WirtschaftsWoche to print a correction to an article that claimed Piech wore “garish ties with hunting motifs” and did not know the exact number of his children from various marriages, a court spokesman said. The magazine, owned by the Handelsblatt group, had published a picture of Piech wearing a tie with a picture of a man with a gun and an elephant. It quoted Piech as saying in an interview that he had sired “about a dozen children. The exact number is not known”. The court accepted Piech’s argument that his comment had been meant ironically and that the motif on his tie was not a hunting motif…
Mr Wakefield is not and never has been a member of the Communist Party. The error is regretted.
In a March 17 story about protests planned against the Iraq war, The Associated Press erroneously identified Jeremy Straughn as a political socialist at Purdue University. He is a political sociologist.
She’s got the patent resume of somebody that has serious skill. She loves football. She’s African-American, which would kind of be a big coon. A big coon. Oh my God. I am totally, totally, totally, totally, totally sorry for that. [He meant “coup”.]
Recent articles in this column may have given the impression that Mr Sven Goran Eriksson was a greedy, useless, incompetent fool. This was a misunderstanding. Mr Eriksson is in fact a footballing genius. We are happy to make this clear.
I especially like the recipe ones…just the thought of some unsuspecting reader eating her meatballs with all those chilies or the fellow debating whether he should serve his obviously raw braised beef to the rest of his family. Be sure to check out the whole list.
[1] When I first posted this, I misspelled “Regret” as “Reget”. (No, really!) I deeply regret the error. (thx, mauayan)↩
How one man (and his multimillion dollar business) went up against the entrenched system of US milk price controls and lost. Yay, American politics!
Upscale retailer Barney’s is selling cans of Campbell’s Tomato Soup with Andy Warhol labels. 4 cans for $48.
Frozen beer tricks
I learned something terrific yesterday: if you take a really cold but still liquid beer out of the freezer and open it, the beer will freeze within seconds. The freezing trick also works if instead of opening the beer, you give the unopened bottle a sharp rap. The reasons I’ve found online for why the trick works varies slightly for the two cases. According to Daryl Taylor’s site for science teachers, opening the bottle changes the pressure in the bottle and thus lowers the temperature:
The sealed bottle’s envoronment has a specific volume, pressure, and temperature. By changing one, you are necessarily affecting the others. The chilled liquid has a smaller temperature, esentially the same volume, thus a smaller smaler pressure. This is, of cousre, according to the basic gas-law, PVNERT. Better known as PV=nRT. Even though the internal pressure has decreased, it is still far greater than the pressure outside the container, namely one atmosphere. Upon opening, the pressure inside drastically plunges as it tries to equalize with the atmosphere. This rapid decrease in P corresponds to a rapid decrease in T, since the V is essentially the same. This rapid drop in temperature of a liquid that is NEAR freezing actually plunges the liquid into a frozen state.
Not sure I completely buy this…does the ideal gas law work for liquids? I can see that the small amount of gas in the neck of the bottle would decrease in pressure and thus decrease in temperature and that might be enough to spur the liquid into freezing. For a better answer for both cases, I consulted the internet’s all-seeing oracle, Ask Metafilter. This comment gives a succinct answer:
The beer is below the freezing temperature, but there is not enough contamination for the ice to form. The bubbles of carbon dioxide released when the bottle is hit act as nuclei for ice crystal growth in the supercooled beer. Same thing happens in reverse when water is microwaved in a smooth container but won’t boil until hit.
This more scientific discussion of unfreezable water provides more evidence of what may be going on: supercooling effects, the carbon dioxide in solution hindering freezing (osmotic depression of freezing point), and hydration factors. Anyway, wicked cool! Supercooled beer!
Update: If you require visual proof, check out these two videos of beer freezing after it’s been opened. Here’s a video with water…so fast! (via digg)
The best and worst restaurant trends in NYC for 2006. Among the worst, Mexican: “Zero progress on one of the most misunderstood and untapped cuisines in NYC.”
The Google 15
the fifteen pounds that new Google employees supposedly gain in their first year at Google from gorging on the omnipresent free food.
Meg reports some sad news that I already suspected: Hellmann’s Mayonnaise has changed its recipe. I’m a bit of a sandwich and mayonnaise fanatic, so when something started tasting a little off with the new jar, I figured something was up. Tastes like they added a little mustard to me.
Little People is a series of photographs of tiny handpainted people depicted in different situations around London. Reminds me of the tiny people with food photos of Akiko Ida and Pierre Javelle. It would be neat to monkey with the depth of field in these photos so that somehow both the little people and the background were in focus, making it seem more like the people weren’t little.
A special bachelorette party menu from a French restaurant. “Steak Frites with Bearnaise drizzle slowly administered tableside by young, handsome, patient male waiter.”
Frito-Lay Angrily Introduces Line Of Healthy Snacks. “
Frito-Lay Angrily Introduces Line Of Healthy Snacks. “Weren’t Sun Chips healthy enough for you, you goddamn hippie bastards?”
Melting pot
At one of the few chain restaurants in Chinatown today, I witnessed a Spanish-speaking cashier taking an order from a Cantonese-speaking customer off of an English-only menu. It took awhile, but the woman seemed satisfied as she left with her food.
Cameron tells us about the peak-end rule, whereby you remember an experience by the high (or low) point and the ending. “Having recently been on a vacation, it strikes me that this heuristic is of utmost importance in planning long events.” The p-e rule is probably also something to keep in mind for event/conference organizers…end on a high note. Oh, and some restaurants do this really well: they send you home with a delicious something to enjoy the next day, extending the experience and ending on a high note with a yummy breakfast.
The cheapness and small footprint of flat panel TVs has made it much easier for restaurants and bars to just hang them up any old where…and spurred on by the recent World Cup festivities, that’s exactly what’s happened in NYC.
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